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University of Kentucky Employs HP Cluster Platform For HPC

HP announced a comprehensive package of hardware, software and services that significantly boosts the performance and functionality of clusters while reducing their complexity for high-performance computing (HPC) customers.

The HP Unified Cluster Portfolio, which includes two new entry-level HP Integrity servers and an enhanced version of HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share, is a new family of pre-configured, pre-tested cluster solutions based on industry standards. The offering helps HPC customers manage and visualize the large volumes of data created by computational analysis.

Already a leader in HPC with 31.5 percent market share, HP plans to extend that lead with its Unified Cluster Portfolio for HPC clusters, a segment growing 50 percent annually.

"Until recently, HPC customers were constrained to a narrow range of choice and functionality," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager of High-Performance Computing at HP. "If they wanted a customized solution they would be forced to go with proprietary systems. Today, HP is staking out a larger claim in the HPC market as the only vendor to deliver cluster solutions coupled with packaged applications that offer simplicity, flexibility and increased performance at lower cost."

The Unified Cluster Portfolio is the first solution in the industry to provide a common implementation across multiple operating systems and servers based on industry-standard processors and through participation with partners and the open source community.

Supercomputing at the University of Kentucky

The University of Kentucky's (UK) Center for Computational Sciences is laying the groundwork to become a national center for computational chemistry. The performance and stability of the clusters handling the associated processing workload is extremely critical.

The UK Center recently purchased a 128-node HP Cluster Platform 3000, with XC System Software and a 6-TB HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share cluster. Additionally, they rely on a supercomputer made up of four HP Integrity Superdome servers with a total of 224 processors running HP-UX 11i v2 with HP Virtual Server Environment.

"Our challenge was to boost our capacity to meet increasing levels of research and to achieve the highest performance available for our chemistry applications," said John Connolly, director of the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Kentucky. "HP delivered a cluster platform that combined the flexibility of a custom-built solution with the simplicity, reliability and value of a pre-configured, factory-built product. The result is a supercomputer that is attracting the top students and researchers from across the country to our campus."

Unified Cluster Portfolio Components

The HP Unified Cluster Portfolio features innovations in computation, visualization and data management.

The foundation of the portfolio consists of three new standards-based, factory pre-assembled and tested HP cluster platforms that can extend to as many as 512 systems (more than 1,000 processors) and a comprehensive software range of commercial and open source reference applications and tools. Engineered and supported by HP, the XC System Software V2 for Linux is available as a cluster management option for the HP cluster platform.

XC software is scalable, primarily open source, and can be integrated with HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share. XC software provides single-system management for job and resource scheduling and simplified software installation, resulting in higher levels of productivity and scalability. Delivering large, fast and simplified storage, the release of HP StorageWorks

Scalable File Share (HP SFS) is a Linux cluster file server based on Lustre technology, which incorporates HPC-oriented HP StorageWorks SFS20 disk arrays for optimized price/performance.

The release of HP MPI (Message Passing Interface) is an industry-first transparent universal interface (for both UNIX and Linux) that enables technical ISVs to write applications that will run over a variety of high- speed interconnects.

Expected to be available in early 2005, HP Scalable Visualization technology is an open, affordable high-end visualization solution based on HP-developed Sepia technology and industry-standard components which is integrated with XC System Software and support for HP StorageWorks SFS.

Broad Vendor Support

The HP Unified Cluster Portfolio is supported by a broad range of leading independent software vendors that offer applications to customers in industries such as aerospace, automotive, life and material sciences, and oil and gas.

Accelrys Inc helps customers in the life and material sciences industry accelerate the design, discovery and development of pharmaceuticals and chemicals by providing products and services in informatics and computation.

"HP's cluster platforms provide a solid reference configuration for our Materials Studio applications for quantum mechanical simulation by offering flexible solutions that meet a diverse set of customer needs," said Keith Glassford Ph.D., director of Materials Science at Accelrys. "The industry- standard HP Unified Cluster Portfolio, with HP MPI, helps us develop applications that mitigate risk as they will run across various high-speed interconnects, making them much more attractive to our customers."

"HP's new cluster platforms are perfectly on the mark for the CAE community," said Paul Bemis, vice president of Product Marketing at Fluent Inc. "Customers using our computational fluid dynamics software are eager to take advantage of highly scalable clusters based on industry-standard technology. We are delighted to see HP focused on this opportunity and believe that HP's range of offerings within the Unified Cluster Portfolio will be well received by our customers."

More information on the HP Unified Cluster Portfolio is available at http://www.hp.com/go/clusterportfolio.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended July 31, 2004, HP revenue totaled $78.4 billion. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.